Video 6:52
Australia in the middle of a gold rush

Updated
Sat 6 Mar 2010, 6:49 AM AEDT

Old NSW mines might be re-opened because of a large increase in gold prices.

Transcript

QUENTIN DEMPSTER, PRESENTER: Apparently Australia's in the midst of its third great gold rush and NSW is right in the thick of it. Soaring international gold prices have put old mines back in the sights of speculators. Modern mining can create local jobs and encourage infrastructure spending, but at what cost?

BARRY MCGOWAN, MINING AUTHOR AND HISTORIAN: Australia was a different country in the 19th Century. It was a country of immigrants. People came from the mother country, if you like, here. They came for a better life and they were prepared to endure almost anything to get it.

And this is where they lived. They lived in their humble little buildings and in their tents and in their shacks until they could afford something better. There were no kings and queens around here.

CHRIS KIMBALL, REPORTER: Tucked into the hills above Bredbo between Canberra and Cooma, preserved by isolation and a brutal environment, sits a pair of gold mining ghost towns. They're living museums of mining history and life as a pioneer prospector.

BARRY MCGOWAN: You could almost describe gold as the Tattslotto of the 1890s, or of the 19th Century. This was your one chance, your one chance to really strike it rich.

CHRIS KIMBALL: Barry McGowan has tracked many stories of those who made their fortunes or failed. An author and mining historian, he says there's more than just precious metal in the Bredbo hills.

BARRY MCGOWAN: Now what's unique about this is that in almost every mining community I've ever seen, the new town is built on top of the old town. So all the vestiges like the hotel and the other - and the hut sites are just built over. And what you have is this overlay. But that didn't happen here. So you've got the 1890s village here and then several kilometres back up the road, on the ridge, you've got the 1930s, 1940s village.

CHRIS KIMBALL: This is what remains of the 1890s village called Cowra Creek.

This is the old hotel site here, Barry?

BARRY MCGOWAN: Absolutely, yes.

CHRIS KIMBALL: Which I guess was a very important place in a gold mining village?

BARRY MCGOWAN: This was the most visited building in the town and it was a very large hotel. You can see from the walls going back to the chimney, double-barrelled chimney, another fireplace there, fireplace there, probably a kitchen over there. So this was a large establishment.

CHRIS KIMBALL: A century ago, a town of 200 was a significant place. There were social events, a school and sport, until things turned bad leading up to the First World War.

BARRY MCGOWAN: When things went bad, they went bad with a vengeance because of the isolation, because of the climate and dryness and very severe winters. There was a lot of illness here. Influenza, scarlet fever, whooping cough, you name it. The kids got the lot. Fresh food was often hard to come by. And at one stage the whole society seem to be reduced to a medieval hunting and gathering society, almost a peasant culture.

CHRIS KIMBALL: So Cowra Creek faded to ruins, but the lure of gold drew them back, almost 40 years later, this is driven by BHP, a new town formed on nearby ridge line called Cowarra.

BARRY MCGOWAN: In terms of artefacts you can see the garden beds, you can see the improvised clothes boilers, cake tins, lamps. You can see the beer bottles with the dates on the bottom telling you exactly when the people were there. All that stuff. That's really unique.

CHRIS KIMBALL: Strong local links remain to that history. Greg Hayden and Jan Williams were Cowarra kids. Jim Flynn also lived there as a child and his first full-time job was at the mine as a 16 year old.

What was life like out there?

JIM FLYNN, FMR COWARRA RESIDENT: Great. We didn't know any better. We were country people and we had our mum and dad looking after us. We weren't used to having electricity or water laid on, that type of thing.

JAN WILLIAMS, FMR COWARRA RESIDENT: There were no gardens, no lawns. It was lots of rocks.

GREG HAYDEN, FMR COWARRA RESIDENT: Big snowfall in - I think it was 1949. I wouldn't have known that then, but there was I think about three foot of snow. Dad built an igloo out the front of the house.

CHRIS KIMBALL: Do you think that place is a little bit of snapshot of living in a little isolated town at that time?

JAN WILLIAMS: Definitely. Yep, yeah. But it was fun because the whole town - when there was something on, the whole town would come together. That's what I can remember mostly. I mean, there were kids and old people and younger people and everyone was involved in whatever was happening, whether it was tennis or whether it was in the hall, functions in the hall.

CHRIS KIMBALL: Was there much talk about gold in those days? You have these images of a gold mining village.

JIM FLYNN: No, no, no. It was pretty hard to come by out there. You couldn't just walk along the street and pick up a nugget or two like Kalgoorlie. But you had to work hard for it. And it was crushed with a crusher and the cyanide treatment to get the gold out of the ore. And it wasn't easily obtainable. It was hard work.

CHRIS KIMBALL: Was it sad to see that little community just fade away?

JAN WILLIAMS: It was. I think it was.

GREG HAYDEN: Yeah, well we had playmates and all of a sudden we didn't. I remember there were a heap of cats. They all left and left their cats behind and my brother and I ended up with ringworms because we used to play with all these cats and we had our heads shaved for about four months, and I've gone back to that now!

CHRIS KIMBALL: The lost mines of the Monaro won't stay that way for long. Gold has never been a more attractive investment and modern mining techniques mean old operations can be reworked. Former mine sites like Majors Creek near Braidwood have already drawn multimillion-dollar reopening plans. Cowarra could be next.

ROBERT MCCAULEY, CEO, CAPITAL MINING: This is what a lot of people consider to be the third sort of big gold rush in Australia and I think that this is just the beginning.

CHRIS KIMBALL: Robert McCauley is the CEO of Capital Mining. Last year, Stateline reported on his company's plans for a new mine near Bredbo. Now Capital Mining has taken up a n exploration lease for the Cowarra site.

ROBERT MCCAULEY: At the moment, gold is at that AU$1,150 mark. I could see and, you know, all reports and analysis that I've looked at that it's very possible to go well above the AU$2,000 mark and further in the future, and of course as that happens the bottom line for any prospective reopening would increase dramatically and so make some of those older areas quite economic and able to be reopened.

CHRIS KIMBALL: Reopened perhaps, but at what cost? These heritage areas are delicate. The region is susceptible to bushfire, as demonstrated by last year's blaze just to the north near Michelago. Many of these access roads were also built by hand with stones a century ago.

Environmentally there are longstanding concerns about the toxic sludge dams at the site which sit above the Bredbo River and ultimately the Murrumbidgee catchment area.

ROBERT MCCAULEY: I think people are very aware of these things these days. And mining companies do try to do the right thing. We want to do the right thing, both environmentally and with heritage areas. And we certainly will be looking after any of the areas that are of heritage significance within the Cowra Creek and Cowarra area.

BARRY MCGOWAN: Both of 'em, together, form a uniqueness which I have not come across anywhere else in all my experiences of looking at ghost towns or mining towns or mining villages. I believe that there's always potential for threat when a new mining operation opens up. More people know about the site. More people visit the sites, and therefore the risks of pillage and plunder are greater. People don't always necessary appreciate what they're looking at.